


Come Home ('Cause I've Been Waiting For You)

by platonicbullshit



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 19:35:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18556411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/platonicbullshit/pseuds/platonicbullshit
Summary: The first thing Tessa notices is a picture frame.Maybe she should be embarrassed that she hadn’t picked up on it earlier. Maybe she should have noticed the missing coats in the hall closet, the lack of shoes scattered around the rack she’s fought so hard to maintain. Maybe she shouldn’t have ignored the musty quiet settling over the house, the lack of keys in the bowl by the door. Maybe she should have noticed the drawer in the closet still pulled slightly ajar, or the empty hangers still swinging on the rod.





	Come Home ('Cause I've Been Waiting For You)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!! I am deep in the end of the semester but I had this idea and I really needed to write it, so I did!! Enjoy!!

The first thing Tessa notices is a picture frame.

Maybe she should be embarrassed that she hadn’t picked up on it earlier. Maybe she should have noticed the missing coats in the hall closet, the lack of shoes scattered around the rack she’s fought so hard to maintain. Maybe she shouldn’t have ignored the musty quiet settling over the house, the lack of keys in the bowl by the door. Maybe she should have noticed the drawer in the closet still pulled slightly ajar, or the empty hangers still swinging on the rod.

But the first thing she notices is a picture frame, sitting in its usual spot on his desk, picture missing.

There used to be a picture of her there, positioned right behind the cup of pens and markers – now missing as well – and next to the ring stained into the wood from all of the times he put down his coffee cup without a coaster.

Well, at least she won’t have that to yell at him about anymore.

Tessa retraces the path she’d taken since she got home, taking stock of his missing clothes in the closet, his cereal and protein powder missing from the cabinets in the kitchen, the worn jean jacket and work boots absent from their usual messy stash in the hall closet.

She thinks that maybe she should cry, or yell, maybe she should kick and scream, maybe she should call him and beg him to come back, to fit himself back into the space in her life that’s been shaped like him for years now. She thinks that maybe she should feel that empty space, should long for it to be filled. She thinks that maybe she should miss him.

Instead, Tessa breathes out a sigh of relief, pulls her hair into a knot at the top of her head, and calls her best friend.

++

“I brought triple chocolate ice cream, the Princess Bride, and unlimited hugs.” Scott doesn’t knock or ring the bell, just lets himself into her house, a plastic bag hanging off of one arm, and comes charging into her living room. He stops short when he finds her, propped up in the corner of her couch in jeans and her glasses, brows furrowed as she types furiously on her laptop.

“Oh, hi!” Tessa pushes her glasses up her nose as he settles himself onto the couch beside her, eyeing her warily. “I was just responding to some emails.”

“Are you… are you okay kiddo?” Scott asks, causing Tessa to look up at him suddenly, confusion settling into the lines around her eyes. “You’re acting weird.”

“I am?” Tessa looks down at herself self-consciously.

“Yeah, I expected you to be in pajamas and wrapped up in a blanket, crying over a romcom you know you’ll hate.” Scott explains, causing Tessa to giggle. “Instead you’re dressed, you’ve showered, and you’re responding to work emails. What gives?”

Tessa just shrugs, not sure how to explain her current behavior.

“Tess, your boyfriend of six years just up and walked out of your life with no explanation less than twenty four hours ago. Aren’t you supposed to be upset about that?”

Tessa opens and closes her mouth a few times, suddenly unable to form a sentence, before shrugging once again and turning back to her work.

Because the truth is, Tessa has been asking herself the same question since she got home to find her place scrubbed clean of Ryan’s things. She keeps wondering why she can’t feel sad over this, why it doesn’t feel like a significant part of her life has just been ripped, why, no matter how many sad songs she listens to, she just can’t find it in herself to cry over him.

“You’re allowed to be upset over this, T,” Scott is saying, and Tessa is suddenly aware that he has gently closed her laptop and placed it on the coffee table in front of them, as maneuvered her so that he can wrap his arms around her, and is now rubbing her back in long, soothing strokes. Tessa falls against him, relaxes into his embrace.

His touch is comforting, but she still isn’t sad.

“I know I’m allowed to be sad,” she starts, shifting slightly to get comfortable in his arms. “I’m just not. I guess I saw it coming…”

She didn’t though, and that’s what gets her. She had been shocked when she’d realized his things were gone. He’d kissed her on the cheek as she flew out the door this morning, had called “Love you too!” after she had yelled it over her shoulder, had waved goodbye from the doorway just like any other morning. And yet, when she’d found the tie rack empty and the milk missing from the fridge, she’d found it so easy to brush it off.

“Or maybe, I didn’t see it coming.” Tessa shrugs again. “Maybe it just… maybe I don’t really care.”

Scott makes a shocked noise in the back of his throat at her admission, moving so he can see her face. “You didn’t care? Tess, you were together for six years, you lived together for three. We were all waiting for him to pop the question. How can you just not care?”

Tessa bites her lip as she considers Scott’s words. Everyone had been waiting for Ryan to propose? It would have been the natural next step, she supposes, but she had never really thought to expect it. She can’t imagine being married to Ryan Semple, can’t imagine being tied to him for the rest of her life. She can’t imagine the white picket fence, the 2.5 kids and the minivan with him. Should she have been imagining that all this time?

“I never really saw any of that with him,” she confesses. Scott takes a deep breath and Tessa can feel it in the way his arms constrict around her waist and the puff of hot air that hits her neck. “I mean, I never imagined it. That’s just not who we were.”

“I thought that was what you wanted, though?”

“I did.” Tessa says. “I do. I just didn’t want it with Ryan.”

“Oh,” Scott breathes, and the weight of her confession hits her at his lack of comment.

“Oh,” Tessa parrots back, her eyes going wide. “Wow. Okay. So, I’m not sad. I don’t care. I think I might be happy?”

“Yeah?” Scott squeezes her body tighter to him, forcing her to tuck herself against him. His hands spread across her waist and lower back and they burn against the skin that’s exposed between her t-shirt and jeans. She melts further into him, sighing.

“Yeah.”

++

The first few weeks after Ryan leaves are rough. While she’s now fully convinced she never loved him, Tessa is struck by how deeply she had come to rely on having another person consistently present in her life.

The first morning, her alarm rings and she immediately slams it off, rolling over and falling back into slumber. It’s an hour later when she’s jerked into awareness, disoriented and confused, shocked when she checks her phone to find that she only has thirty five minutes until she’s expected in a meeting across town.

She tries desperately to remember when her second alarm went off when she remembers – she had never set a second alarm. It was Ryan’s that went off twenty minutes after hers, him rolling out of bed and shaking her until she was awake that got her out of bed on time every morning.

She scrambles through an abbreviated morning routine, slathering on deodorant and overdoing it on perfume in hopes that no one will notice she hasn’t showered, grabbing an apple to eat on the road.

When she arrives at her meeting, the apple is forgotten deep in her bag and she sets three new alarms.

Two weeks later she’s settled into a somewhat more functional routine. She manages to get out of bed with just enough time to shower _and_ dry her hair every morning, but she’s given up on breakfast. She stashes an entire box of power bars in her purse and gets by on coffee from the break room until lunch.

She’s grateful for Scott, who just keeps on as usual, rolling his eyes at her over the table during meetings and texting her silly jokes he thinks up when the hours crawl by at a snail’s pace and not asking her anything about how she’s feeling about the Ryan situation.

She almost wonders if he forgets about it because of how normal things feel. It seems like there should be awkward moments in there somewhere, a time when she would usually bring her ex-boyfriend up. When Scott invites her to lunch and she should have plans, or when she gets a text and he should ask her if it’s from him. But the moments never come.

Maybe Tessa didn’t think about Ryan outside of their relationship as much as she thought she did.

The normalcy of their relationship eases her through her transition from tied down to bachelorette. She’s comforted by the utter lack of change, she almost forgets about it herself.

And then one day, when she’s run out of power bars and slept through her third alarm and barely had time to swipe mascara on her lashes before dashing out the door, she gets to her desk to a paper cup of coffee – black with a dash of almond milk, her order of the week – and a warm blueberry muffin sitting on a plate.

A pink sticky note is stuck to the middle of the expanse of white, familiar scrawl reading _thought you could use some sustenance this morning. kick some ass today, kiddo! –s._ It makes Tessa’s stomach swoop.

Of course Scott hadn’t forgotten about the fact that the last six years of her life has just crumbled around her and every routine she’d established has fallen to pieces. Because this is Scott, her best friend from childhood, the most thoughtful man she knows, who knows what she needs before she does.

She takes a sip of her coffee and breaks off a piece of her muffin and powers on her computer. She doesn’t know what she’s done to deserve Scott Moir, but she’ll do anything to keep it.

++

Tessa knows she’s a workaholic. When she wakes up in the morning the first thing she thinks about is everything she’s slated to accomplish for the day, and she refuses to leave her office until she’s checked off every last task. And then, when her to-do list is complete, she sets about making the next one. It used to drive Ryan crazy, her tendency to respond to emails over dinner and while they watched a movie and as she lay next to him in bed. He used to complain that he could never make a reservation for them to get dinner because he could never guess when she’d be out of the office. But there’s truly nothing she enjoys more than watching the sun set out of her office windows as the glow of her desktop lights up the room.

Which is exactly her plan for the evening, nearly a month into her new routine, when she’s shaken out of her work induced trance by a knock on her office door.

She nearly leaps out of her chair at the sound resonating through the room. She’d been sure everyone had gone home by now, it’s nearing 8 o’clock on a Friday and she’s sure she had heard the staff writers planning to go out for happy hour almost three hours ago.

“Come in?” Tessa calls out tentatively. The door creaks open slowly, and she can feel her heart racing, thumping against her ribcage. She wonders briefly if the building is being burglarized, if she’s about to be faced with armed criminals, if this is when she dies.

But then Scott steps into the room and flicks on the lights and Tessa catches the tail end of a goofy smile on his lips that quickly fades to a concerned look as he takes her in, sitting at the edge of her desk chair, one hand gripping the edge of her desk and the other clasped over her heart.

“Tess? Are you okay?” Concern laces his voice, and Tessa shakes herself out of her fearful trance.

“Oh! Yes! God, Scott, I’m so glad it’s just you.” Tessa gasps out, straightening herself before standing to pull her friend into a hug.

“Just me?” Scott repeats, mocking offense. “What were you expecting, Beyoncé?”

She’s grateful for his humor, and lets herself laugh a full belly laugh as she wraps her arms around his torso. “No, no. Just momentarily panicked I was going to be murdered. No big deal.”

“Well, that’s what you get for sitting in a dark room in an empty office building, T.” Scott pulls away slightly to look at her. “What are you still doing here, by the way? I stopped by your house but obviously you weren’t there.”

“Just working,” Tessa says, trying to ignore the way her heart beats a little faster at the fact that Scott had been looking for her. “Daily grind and all that.”

“Daily grind? Tessa, it’s a Friday night. Shouldn’t you be getting dressed up and going out hand having fun?” Scott pulls away from her fully, moving toward her desk. Tessa watches as he shuffles around the papers scattered across it, organizing things and packing them away.

“Fun? What’s that?” Tessa jokes, grinning when Scott chuckles. “What are you doing with my stuff?”

“Putting it away,” Scott says, as though it’s obvious.

“I can see that, but why?” Scott rolls his eyes, and Tessa keeps watching him, curious. “I was in the middle of something!”

“As I said, it’s a Friday night. If you won’t go out on your own, I’ll take you myself.” Scott places a folder in her top drawer – she doesn’t want to think about the fact that he somehow knows where everything goes in her office – and then picks up her bag and passes it to her. “We have a reservation to get to. No ifs, ands, or buts.”

He holds out his hand, and she takes it. She thinks that this should be weird, him showing up and taking her out and holding her hand, but it’s not.

She goes willingly.

As much as she loves working, she loves spending time with her best friend even more. He takes her to a little Italian restaurant that she would have never known existed and orders her a glass of wine and a fancy pasta dish she would never get for herself.

When she tells him as much, he shakes his head and tells her that’s exactly why he ordered it for her and to please shut up and enjoy the dinner.

It’s delicious, and he’s as entertaining as ever, and she gets goosebumps when their legs brush underneath the table even though she knows it was an accident. He insists on paying but lets her argue that she’ll get it the next time, and takes her hand as he leads her out of the restaurant.

The walk back to her house is short but pleasant, the late evening air still warm and heavy with springtime, and his hand stays in hers, broad and warm and wrapped delicately around her palm with one of her fingers laced through two of his.

They arrive at her doorstep and his hand traces an absentminded line down the curve of her back as she unlocks the door and steps across the threshold and he salutes her before sticking both hands deep in his pockets, turning on his heel, and walking back down her driveway.

++

Tessa can’t remember if Scott spent much time at her house when Ryan was still around. Obviously, she knows they hung out together all the time, and she figures at least some of that time must have been at her home. She’s sure they’d had movie nights on her couch, that he had made fun of her for her all-white color scheme, that he had rolled his eyes at the picture she has hanging in the hallway leading to the bathroom of the two of them at ages 13 and 15, the year she had forced him to dress up as Romeo to her Juliet for Halloween.

But there’s still something surprising about coming home from work to find him settled on her couch, a hockey game playing on the tv as he scrolls through his email.

Nevertheless, she drops down on the opposite end of the couch, stretches her legs out onto his lap, and sighs dramatically. He immediately drops a hand to massage her right shin, and her sigh turns into a groan.

“Long day, kiddo?” He asks, not looking up from the email he’s reading.

“You could say that,” she all but whines, throwing her arm over her face to block out the soft yet too harsh light from the lamp in the corner. There’s a throbbing behind her left eye and she wonders if she might have a migraine coming on.

She expects him to press her further, to ask about her day or what she has planned for the evening or maybe if she’s eaten, but he seems to sense that she’s not in a mood for talking so he just hums and returns to his scrolling.

Tessa eventually gets up the energy to climb off the couch and pop two ibuprofen, retrieving her laptop on her way back to the living room.

“I was thinking pizza,” Scott announces when she rejoins him, looking at her with an eyebrow raised. Tessa nods eagerly, her mouth suddenly watering at the thought of food. “Veggie?”

“Yes please,” she says before turning back to her laptop. She pulls up the sketches she’d been looking at before she left and lets Scott’s voice and the game still playing on the tv fade into the background.

Scott forces her to put her laptop away when the pizza arrives, encourages her to yell at the refs with him over dinner. When the boxes are empty and their plates are cleared away he pulls out his own computer, settles into the corner of her couch and starts in on work of his own.

Tessa tries to lose herself in reviewing sketches, but she finds herself more focused on the line of Scott’s jaw than the shape of the gowns on her screen, so she switches to editing, but then finds herself distracted by Scott’s leg against hers where they meet on the couch. Eventually she gives up on working, snaps her laptop closed and shoves it off to the side.

Scott looks at her expectantly and she mumbles out some excuse about getting ready for bed before scurrying off in the direction of her bedroom.

She’s changed into her favorite pajamas, a soft, silky pink set, and she’s brushing her teeth in her bathroom when Scott joins her.

“Hey, uh, it’s pretty late. Do you mind if I stay here?”

Tessa checks her phone and is shocked to see the numbers 12:47 shining back up at her.

“Of course!” She garbles around her toothbrush. Scott smiles and reaches out to swipe away a smudge of toothpaste at the edge of her lips. Tessa represses a shiver.

“Great. Do you have a blanket I could borrow? And maybe a pillow?” Scott looks awkwardly at his feet, shuffling beside her.

“Oh my god, no. You’re not sleeping on the couch.” Tessa pulls her toothbrush from her mouth so she can speak more clearly. He looks up at her with wide eyes. “You can sleep with me.”

“No, Tess, I don’t want to impose…” Tessa shakes her head sharply, pulling her most intimidating face. She knows it won’t work on him, knows that when he looks at her he still sees a little seven year old girl with choppy bangs, but she pulls it all the same. It makes him laugh, and some of the tension that’s developed between them eases.

“Please, Scott, it’s no big deal,” Tessa insists.

“Okay, if you don’t think it’ll be awkward,” Scott concedes, and Tessa smiles a broad, toothpaste-full grin at him.

Ten minutes later she climbs into her bed, which is far too big for one person as it is, and resolutely thinks about anything but the fact that her best friend is laying mere inches from her, clad in only a t-shirt and his boxers (she had insisted he not wear his jeans to bed, even if he didn’t have anything to change into). She smiles sleepily at him, turns off the light, and forces herself into sleep.

When she wakes up in the night to a heavy weight over her stomach and a mass of warmth at her side she just snuggles deeper into him, and wishes she could get used to this.

++

At some point, Scott sleeping over becomes something they do. He starts bringing sweats and a toothbrush when he comes over in the evening, and she gets used to his alarm going off at an ungodly hour so that he can sneak out, back to his place to change and get to work before the sun.

Its one of those mornings, one where she longs for the even breathing and warm body at her side when her own alarm goes off, when something changes. She goes through her routine, showering and drying her hair and completing her extensive skin care routine and dressing in her pre-planned outfit before she even emerges from her room and realizes what is different.

Her typically silent apartment is not so silent, some god-awful country song playing softly over her kitchen speaker and a sound she thinks accompanies cooking echoing through the sparsely decorated room. She steps through the doorway and he’s there, hair mussed with sleep and sweats slung low across his hips, flipping an omelette in a pan. She thinks he’s singing softly to himself.

“Morning,” she says, giggling softly as he startles.

“Oh! Morning, Tess,” Scott says, turning to face her with a beaming smile. “Breakfast?”

“I don’t have time-“ she doesn’t manage her excuse before a Tupperware is being forced into her palms. It’s warm, and smells delicious. “Oh, thanks.”

“Have a good day, T,” he says, handing her a fork and a travel mug of coffee before pressing a kiss to her forehead and ushering her toward the door.

When he asks her later, Tessa can’t remember what she does throughout the day, her mind full of mushroom and cheese omelettes and forehead kisses and the smell of him that lingers on her sheets.

++

Tessa secretly loves doing laundry. She loves the methodical process, the sorting and folding and setting timers exactly for the moment the machine turns off. She loves the smell of her detergent wafting through the house as the machine spins. She loves the warmth of freshly dried clothes, seeping into her skin as she folds and puts it all away.

But when laundry day comes and she finds herself tasked with stripping her sheets off her bed, there’s suddenly nothing she wants less than to start this particular load of laundry. She’s not sure why, but suddenly the process of peeling her sheets away, loading them into the machine, and setting it to run feels tedious and depressing. Even her detergent, her favorite kind, scented with lavender, doesn’t smell as sweet as it usually does.

She shovels the mass of fabric into her washer, and feels a pang in her chest as she selects the correct settings.

It’s not until she walks back into her bedroom and flops down onto her bare bed that she realizes. It still smells like Scott.

She doesn’t want to replace that scent with that of her detergent. She’d sleep in a dirty bed for weeks if it meant his warm, musky scent would linger there a moment longer. She rolls over and shoves her face into her pillow, willing herself to force those feelings deep down inside of her.

Eventually, after admittedly too much time spent wallowing in her bed, Tessa forces herself to return to her cleaning. She vacuums her hallway and tidies the living room and wipes down the counters of her kitchen that haven’t been touched in days.

Her washing machine beeps, letting her know the cycle is finished, and she slowly transfers the heap of wet fabric into the dryer, silently mourning the loss of _Scott_ wafting off of them. She sets the dryer to run and starts her first load of clothes.

She throws the load into the washer without much thought and returns to attacking any trace of dust in her gleaming white home.

It doesn’t take her long to complete her weekly clean – Ryan had always complained about her need to maintain a spotless house, had told her that her style was frigid and didn’t look “lived in” – and when she’s happy with the sparkle of her bathroom mirror, she allows herself to collapse onto the couch in the living room and indulge in some trashy reality tv.

She finishes her laundry, remaking her bed but saving all of her folding to do while she watches. When the final load comes out of the dryer, Tessa hauls her basket into the living room and settles in.

The motions are methodical and rhythmic and Tessa loses herself in them. She wraps up her socks and folds her sweatpants and makes a stack of her t-shirts. When she’s content and her basket is full of neat stacks, she pauses her show and makes her way to her bedroom, stepping directly into her closet.

She pulls open a drawer and starts piling up her socks and underwear, only pausing when she reaches into the basket and pulls out a pair of underwear she doesn’t recognize.

She holds it up and lets it unfold and suddenly finds herself confronted with a pair of men’s boxers that she recognizes but can’t quite place. She wonders briefly what the odds are that Ryan had left a pair when he left and she had only just found them now, but she shrugs it off and tosses them to the side. She’ll have to throw them away when she heads back downstairs.

She finishes with her sock and underwear drawers and moves down a row, filing away pajamas and sweatpants when she stops short once again. She reaches into the basket and pulls out a pair of sweatpants she definitely recognizes and she knows for a fact aren’t hers nor Ryan’s.

Along the side of the black pant leg, curly red font reads _Moir’s Skate Shop._

The words sink in and she glances over at the boxers laying feet away from where she sits and of course the stuff is Scott’s. She digs through the basket further and finds another pair of his sweats and several t-shirts.

A nervous giggle rips its way through her as she looks at the clothes scattered in front of her. Before she can talk herself out of it, she pulls open one of the drawers that had been emptied of Ryan’s things months earlier to tuck Scott’s clothes inside.

She sucks in a breath when she realizes there’s already a small collection of his things sitting inside.

++

It gets to the point that Tessa can’t remember the last time Scott didn’t stay at her house. His things find their way alongside hers, his toothbrush slotted in next to hers on the sink, his clothes filed away in her closet, his cereal on the shelf in her kitchen. It happens so gradually she doesn’t think to blink at it, and all she can do is blink sheepishly when she realizes something has changed.

Even after she washes them, her sheets still smell like him.

She gets home from work one day and her exhaustion sits deep inside her bones and she wants nothing more than to curl up in the bath with a glass of wine, but she still has work to finish up before her first meeting the next morning.

The house is still and dark and quiet when she steps over the threshold, and a chill goes up her spine.

Scott should be home by now, but there’s no trace of him.

Panic rises alongside bile in her throat as she creeps through the silent house. Wild theories fill her mind, that he’s been kidnapped or murdered or he’s lying prone on the side of the road somewhere, crying out for help and she can’t hear him. It’s when she steps into the office to put her bag down that the worst theory hits her.

Ryan’s desk looks exactly like it did the day he left her, the empty picture frame staring up at her in the dark.

A sob bubbles up in her throat as she considers that maybe Scott had left her just the way Ryan had. She runs up the stairs and darts into her closet, gasping in desperation as she pulls open the drawers that once held Ryan’s things.

She’s so convinced she’ll find them emptied once more, she’s almost confused to find several pairs of sweats and a couple pairs of boxers and even a pair of his jeans still lined up, folded just the way she likes.

The sob in her throat turns into a laugh so loud she almost misses the sound of her front door being pulled open and slammed shut.

“Tess?” Scott’s voice rings through the house, deep and clear. Tessa leaps to her feet, frantically brushing the tears from her cheeks and flying down the stairs to find him in the entryway, plastic shopping bags hanging from his arms. “Oh, hey, T.”

She launches herself into his arms in response, her force causing him to stumble backward slightly. He shifts the bags higher up on his arms so he can wrap them around her in reciprocation.

She pulls away just enough to look into his face. Confusion creases the spot between his brows but his eyes are shiny and he opens his mouth to speak, but she moves before he has a chance.

In a swift movement she crushes her mouth against his. He’s still for a moment and she starts to pull away, immediately begins planning her apology in the back of her mind, when he grips her tighter, pulls her closer, kisses her harder.

She can feels the handles of the bags pressing against her back and his hands grip her sides so hard she think it’ll bruise and she kisses him with all of the desperation she’d felt in the past twenty minutes and he returns it with force.

It’s not until she’s gasping that she dares to pull away, moving to hug him once more. He dips his face into the side of her neck and it feels like coming home.

“Hey, kiddo,” he rasps into her ear.

“Hi, Scott.” She pulls away to beam at him, and he grins right back.


End file.
